Reading the Dick Pic Reparatively

Over the past several years, the dick pic has been featured prominently in the media and popular discourse. To date, much of the literature on dick pics has focused on what is more commonly known as the “unsolicited dick pic.” Such a perspective has led to dick pics being characterized, almost universally, as an outcome of men’s aggressive heterosexuality and misogynistic tendencies, and thus, the dick pic is seen as a way to make women feel uncomfortable and threatened in a variety of public and digital spaces. Likewise, psychological research has framed the sending of dick pics as only coming from narcissistic men, and that dick pics are the contemporary, digital form of the sexual pathology of flashing and exhibitionism. In this paper, we seek to open, or at least broaden, the conversation about the meanings and understandings of the dick pic, especially outside and beyond the framings of violence and pathology, or rather, what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick might understand as the paranoid reading of the dick pic. We do so by examining three social media sites that post and comment on dick pics. Accordingly, in this article, we seek to provide a reparative reading of the dick pic, specifically considering questions of desire, intimacy, the erotic, and vulnerability. Our approach to this study, thus, is to draw on queer theory to deconstruct and understand the phenomenon of the dick pic.